Author: Małgorzata Szczepańska-Pisz, source: Gazeta Pomorska

On writing: — It is a terrible, physical labour. Anyone who writes with ambition suffers for it. Ebony is my eighteenth book. Writers used to be more prolific. The collected works of Goethe run to 130 volumes; Strindberg’s to 111. I wondered how this could physically be possible. It turned out that a large part of their output was letters.

I write by hand, as do most of my colleagues. In my view the rhythm of prose requires writing by hand. It seems unlikely to me that decent prose could be written on a computer.

On how books come about: — Always in three stages. The first — gathering experience — takes a lifetime. The second — finding the idea for a book and searching for material — takes several years. The third, the shortest (sometimes only a few months) is the physical writing of the book. Ebony took me a year. I wrote each chapter over the course of a week. I know already that no book will ever be a complete success. It is always a disappointment, always falls short. That is why I never read my own books.

On style: — I try to be concise and sparing with words, because I am afraid of boring the reader. I try to express myself clearly, simply, briefly. The world is already full enough of verbosity, bad talk, superficiality.

On literary reportage: — That mixture of genres is what I practise. I combine reportage with literary fiction. Travel is in this case only one of three sources of inspiration. The others are: reading (for Ebony I read about 250 books) and my own reflections.

On Polish subjects: — I will no longer write about Poland, because it is technically impossible. A reporter must be anonymous. And I am no longer able to disappear into a crowd. A reporter who has been recognised loses his chance of writing a good piece.

On poverty: — I am more interested in the fate of the simple, ordinary person than in life on the upper floors of society. Poverty is my speciality.

On criticism: — I am rarely criticised. Perhaps because it is not easy to review literary reportage. The genre demands a double specialisation from the critic. One must be able to evaluate the language of a text about Bolivia and also know a great deal about that country. But I have encountered both kinds of criticism: the malicious kind, interested only in destroying, attacking, mocking, discrediting — and the constructive kind, pointing out stumbles and suggesting something to the author.

On the life of a widely read author: — I write every day. If I manage to write one page in a day, I consider it a good day. Most often I write a quarter or half a page. And often I write nothing at all. When I recently ended a meeting with my friend Professor Andrzej Garlicki saying, “I must hurry — I have to write,” he looked astonished: “You? Write? But you’ve already written everything.”

If I don’t turn the telephone off, I can’t work. I receive 16–20 telephone calls a day, all with proposals — to come to Tokyo, Strasbourg, Bydgoszcz. I accept only a tiny fraction of the invitations. I also receive thousands of written requests for recommendations, prefaces, reviews of others’ work. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I haven’t been to the cinema, theatre, or a concert in a long time. I get up at around 6 in the morning and don’t know where to begin. I am a slave to my own situation.

On travel: — I have never taken a holiday in my life and have never travelled as a tourist. My journeys, on the other hand, usually last several months. They are very difficult: dangerous, in countries with no infrastructure. I typically lose 10–12 kilograms. My next book — about how the great non-European civilisations (Islam, Hinduism, Latin American Christianity) look on the threshold of the twenty-first century — requires three journeys. I have already been to the Middle East. This year I still want to travel to Asia and Latin America.

On the world: — The injustice of the world is deepening. The gap is widening between those who are doing well and those who are doing very badly. 267 individuals have annual incomes equal to the combined income of half of humanity. Of the 6 billion people on earth, as many as two thirds live in poverty. There are no mechanisms to level out these differences. On the contrary, the gulf between rich and poor keeps growing. I see no hope of improvement. Although on the other hand the world is completely unpredictable. In 1977 Kissinger, the US Secretary of State, said that we must accept that communism will last at least a hundred years. He did not foresee that the collapse of the Soviet Union would begin almost immediately.

On awards: — They are in my study in my Warsaw flat. I try not to display them, because it looks foolish. There is an element of vanity in it that I would prefer to avoid.

Transcribed by Małgorzata Szczepańska-Pisz
Copyright © Gazeta Pomorska

source: kapuscinski.info